More often than not, gaming laptops aren’t a great value. But sometimes there are exceptions near the holidays, and HP’s 15-inch Pavilion gaming laptop is one of them. It’s on sale for $599.99 on eBay, which is hundreds off of its original price. Inside of this machine is just about enough to power through the latest PC games on low to medium graphical settings at playable frame rates. Though if you enjoy playing, say, Fortnite, this will run it smoothly on higher settings.
Looking at the specs, what stands out here is its Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti which, while not necessarily a workhorse for gaming, is the de facto GPU in gaming laptops that usually costs hundreds more. In addition to the decent graphics card, this laptop features a 15.6-inch matte IPS display that pushes a 1080p resolution, an 8th Gen Intel Core i5 processor, 8GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage via a 7,200RPM spinning drive. While all of that is pretty much par for the course, HP’s Pavilion budget gaming laptop has a few unexpected niceties, like a USB-C port, backlit keyboard, and a complimentary game bundle that lets you pick five free games, including Cuphead and Total War: Warhammer II, among others.
The next best price for a similar machine comes from HP itself for $789, though its own baseline model starts you out with the lesser Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 with 2GB of video RAM compared to the above model’s 1050 Ti that features 4GB.